London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth, Patrick Radden Keefe, Picador, £22.

This book is a thriller combined with a harsh and accurate account of the decline of London under the reign of money. Patrick Radden Keefe is a meticulous researcher and an adept storyteller. Above all, he sees the strangeness of things.

Nothing could be more strange than an incident at 2:23am on a November morning in 2019. Not entirely strange but certainly sad was the sight of a 19-year-old boy falling from a fifth-floor balcony into the River Thames. Suicides happen. This one became very strange because the headquarters of MI6 was directly across the river. From there a security camera recorded the fall. The boy’s name was Zac Brettler.

The strangeness intensifies when we discover that the boy had adopted a Russian name, becoming Zac Ismailov. He had fallen from Riverwalk, a double block of flats for the super-rich, much too expensive for Zac. His parents – Rachelle and Matthew, both children of Holocaust survivors – were well-off but certainly not super-rich. While they spent money on their children’s education, they had ‘little interest in the status markers of consumption’. But Zac had grown up to be mesmerised by London’s corrupting wave of hot money. His parents were baffled and anxious when he acquired dubious friends, most of them foreign, notably Russian, but they tolerated this because he did seem to be enjoying himself and making money of his own.

This points to the central theme of this book. In 1986 the old world of ‘the City’, London’s financial district of genteel bankers, brokers and jobbers was blown apart by deregulation, creating, in Radden Keefe’s words, ‘the oligarchs, a small fractious fraternity of free-market bandits who amassed outsize fortunes’. And he quotes one rich Russian who had observed this process – ‘they are stealing everything and it is impossible to stop them’.

The City was flooded with these foreign operators and then eager young Brits – ‘A generation of smart, eager, morally elastic young British professionals enthusiastically signed on to serve as fixers of every stripe.’ The ensuing ‘Big Bang’ was the true falling of London, an event that finally, suicide or not, pushed Zac off that balcony.

The body was found some time later. It had been washed down the Thames, almost across the whole of London. The police had convinced themselves that it was suicide. But Zac’s grandfather did not believe this – ‘I think he was murdered’ – and his parents agreed. They fought for years against police resistance to prove this; in the process they became aware of the appalling after-effects of the Big Bang. They discovered, with the help of the author, that Zac had been given money by hucksters who had no real money of their own; they borrowed furiously from gullible lenders without any intention of paying back. ‘What made’, asks Radden Keefe of one huckster, ‘one think that it was a good idea to introduce a naive eighteen-year-old boy like Zac to such a monster?’

As early as 2020, Zac’s parents, Matthew and Rachelle, realised that the police ‘had quietly stopped trying’. But they ploughed on, clutching their faith that their son could not have killed himself.

Radden Keefe also persists. He takes apart the whole story. Throughout, he is better informed than both the police and the parents. He is so close that he becomes a protagonist, discovering things unknown to the others and forcing the police to listen.

London is the hero of this book. The author loves and knows this city well, but it is fallen and now he mourns its decline into a city full of hot money and speculative greed. He clearly longs for the pre-1986 world. He is right to do so. I was a financial journalist before 1986 but, after the Big Bang, I lost all interest in the City. The only code was the code of greed. Back in the day, I would lunch with people who talked about philosophy, art and politics. Those conversations disappeared after Big Bang, as did the reason for the City’s existence as a British institution. Now, as Bob Dylan sang, ‘money doesn’t talk, it swears’.

In one brilliant stroke towards the end of the book, Radden Keefe introduces the 1873 novel The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley. It defined a second American revolution as a nation that was growing richer but increasingly unequal. It was their own Big Bang. This was a revolution that the authors felt they needed to explain. This, they wrote, was a phenomenon that was ‘Good, because it allows neither to stand still, but drives both ever on towards some point or others… Bad because the chosen point is often badly chosen, and then the individual is wrecked.’

Zac Brettler was one of many victims of our very own gilded age.